After the SFO declined to prosecute anyone over the 2005 collapse of carmaker MG Rover, business secretary Peter Mandelson snapped into action, asking his mandarins to start gathering the evidence needed to bar some of the key players from corporate life. MG Rover was sold to the Phoenix consortium by BMW in 2000 and collapsed five years later. The businessmen who ran the consortium, known as the Phoenix Four, are thought to have received about £40m in pay and pensions contributions during that time. They were quick to respond to the SFO's decision by blaming ministers, saying the government failed to support a rescue deal that they claim could have saved Rover.

Jobless figures hit 7.8%

Unemployment in Britain soared by 220,000 in the three months to June to 2.435 million, its highest level since 1995. The Office for National Statistics said that joblessness had now reached 7.8% of the workforce. The figures also showed a 271,000 drop in the number of people in work - the biggest since records began in 1971. There was a rise of more than 50,000 in the number of the under-25s without work to a total of 928,000, fuelling fears of a "lost generation" of jobless. The Prince's Trust warned that around half of these were able to claim unemployment benefit, which was now costing the government £3.4m a day.

FSA's pay code attacked

The Financial Services Authority published its long-awaited code on bankers' pay, but halved the number of firms affected and backed away from imposing draconian salary controls. Chief executive Hector Sants maintained that such action was a matter for the government, not the regulator, and City minister Lord Myners duly leapt into the fray by announcing that he was prepared to take further action against the bonus culture at large financial institutions. Myners fumed: "The short-term bonus culture in the global banking industry must end."

Green shoots surprise

On Thursday, it was revealed Germany and France had managed to pull out of recession, recording surprise increases in gross domestic product in the second quarter of 2009. It was the first growth since the first quarter of 2008. "The recession has ended, and it has ended sooner than we all thought. This is good news," said an upbeat Andreas Rees at Unicredit. But the British economy shrank by 0.8% in the second quarter. Recovery could be "slow and protracted", Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned on Wednesday. "The world economy remains in a deep recession and its financial system in a fragile condition," he said.

Al Fayed loses dividend

Testing times for Mohamed Al Fayed: the flamboyant retail tycoon may have to forgo spending sprees in his Harrods department store this year. Until the recession, his Knightsbridge-based retail empire had brought in an average of more than £700,000 a week, but new accounts revealed its holding company failed to deliver any dividend payout to the Al Fayed family in the year to January 2009.